By Marcus Morgan, M.Ed., CPT Fitness Professional & Workout Planner
The Journey Starts with Your Diet
There is an important, yet simple idea you should know while on your fitness journey—macronutrient. Your fitness can be largely enhanced by addressing basic ideas involving your nutrition. What I have done is taken the time to research some ideas about nutrition and body weight, in addition to my current knowledge, to identify some foundations that will help you through your trial and error nutrition journey—what I found will help you fine tune your diet.
What's important about your food? ...nutrients...specifically, macronutrients!
A good question we should all be asking is "why is the food that we eat important enough to monitor" ? The food we eat provides us energy in the form of nutrients. The nutrients not only provide energy, but they also rebuild our bodies, maintenance our bodies, and control our moods. The most common nutrients that people control are the "macronutrients". Macronutrients include the following nutrients:
Protein - a nutrient that is responsible for cell rebuilding, physical healing, muscle growth, and metabolism maintenance.
Fat - a nutrient responsible for hormone maintenance, physical protection, starvation defense, disease resistance, and recovery; also backup energy for prolonged physical activity is provided. It also has an effect on mood.
Carbohydrate - a nutrient commonly referred to as "sugar" and "glucose". It affects the blood sugar levels and can be stored as "glycogen" in the muscles and organs. It provides quick energy and can be easily stored as "fat" when not physically active at a certain level.
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How do we keep up with macronutrients when using a recipe?
It's easy to monitor the calories in the foods we eat. It is also easy to weigh and find the nutrient content of foods before we cook— we can easily read the nutrition facts to find macronutrient content (protein, fat, carbohydrate). But, here are a couple of questions that confused meal planners and dieters may ask:
1.) How do we monitor the macronutrients that are in recipes?
The nutrition facts show a serving size related to the measurements of the ingredients and what's just right for you. The serving size includes macronutrient information as an estimate of the amounts of protein, carbohydrate, and fat possibly ending up on our plates.
2.) Do we know the exact macronutrient content on our plates?
No. We don’t know the exact macronutrient content on our dinner plates, but the nutrition facts do provide a good estimate based on scientific research and culinary arts.
The nutrition facts on food packages will also reveal the macronutrients you receive per serving size. Macronutrients include proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
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